Allow me to clarify regarding the DIA Fdn.
What once began as an agency of change, a foundation dedicated to
artists engaged in projects and strategies that defied commodity status
or simply fell outside the boundaries of prevailing market structures,
has now achieved its own antithesis as a commodities broker
specializing in the reconstitution, reclassification and preservation
of trans-historical artifacts.

DIA’s reversal of mission was concomitant with its reversal of fortune
in the mid-90’s when the foundation was commandeered by entrepreneur
Lenny Riggio. One need only visit DIA Beacon, a veritable Disneyland of
60’s and 70’s art, much of it recreated and frozen in time, to
appreciate the fact that the market never sleeps, and the dreamer only
dreams.

While Spiral Jetty will never post returns to anyone’s bottom line, its
careful administration (preservation) affords DIA something better than
money - profile. (A similar situation exists in the current plans to
restore Michael Heizer’s Double Negative and regulate visitation.) And
profile, in Lenny’s world anyway, is the best and cheapest kind of
advertising. And if that means stopping time, and subverting
provenance, then so be it. It’s worth it, as long as it’s worth it.

Smithson was not an environmentalist by any stretch of the
imagination, nor did he believe there was any such thing as “Nature” -
as something separate and distinct from human endeavor. In fact, the
notion that progress and technology (even in its most egregious uses)
have somehow removed us from “Nature” or set us against “Nature” is
patently absurd, a fiction sustained by arrogance religion, and feeble
reasoning.

Ironically, 50 years ago, Smithson was not only inspired but
strengthened in his resolve by the wreckage and debris that once
greeted the visitor to the site of Spiral Jetty, the wreckage and
debris of a failed oil drilling operation of the mid-20th century. In
his eyes, these things, this industrial junk (now removed - sanitized
in the last few years by the DIA Fdn in the interest of stopping time
for profit)was of the highest aesthetic value, a motivating factor in
his placement of the work.

The cult of preciousness, the very thing Smithson held in contempt
throughout his career, has finally caught up with him; the meaning of
the work has finally been separated from the work itself; entropy has
finally been defeated.
Nancy Holt is wrong. And if Robert Smithson himself were to rise from
the dead and rail against the oil industry I would call him a liar and
a fake.

I have been to Spiral Jetty, and as excellent as that experience was,
it wasn’t the jetty that set me free, it was the intention, faint but
still sensible, like the sound of the sea in a shell.

The National Trust for Historic Preservation is out with a statement
on the Spiral Jetty situation. From NTHP prez Richard Moe: "The
National Trust for Historic Preservation believes that Robert
Smithson's Spiral Jetty on the Great Salt Lake is a significant
cultural site from the recent past, merging art, the environment, and
the landscape. We are deeply concerned about the potential harm that
energy development could bring to the Spiral Jetty."

UPDATE 2/1/08: While there are several practical updates on the blogs for those concerned about the potential impact of drilling near Spiral Jetty,

[Via]: The comment period about the Spiral Jetty-impacting energy development
has been extended to Feb. 13. For more information from the state of
Utah, click here. For more information on how to comment, click here.

I just received an email from a colleague of mine informing me that new oil development plans threaten the integrity of Robert Smithson's Spiral Jetty.
According to the artist's widow Nancy Holt, a number of pipes and pumps
will be laid beneath the water and shore, as well as roads built for
oil tank trucks, and cranes for other project needs, all of which
promise to severely alter the surrounding environment including Spiral
Jetty.* A call for help is currently being circulated, the protest
deadline, 7 PM ET today. Those wishing to voice their concerns should
email or call Jonathan Jemming 801-537-9023 jjemming@utah.gov. Refer to
Application # 8853.

*Is this in fact the case? I first noticed the story on Tyler Green's blog yesterday (Spiral Jetty threatened by energy development). My
initial reaction was, perhaps oddly, not to man the battlements. (I'll
explain why in a second). Later in the day my Inbox was flooded with
concerned emails from friends, including sculptor Stefanie Nagorka with whom I visited the Jetty in 2002
right after it first re-emerged after many years of being submerged underwater. I found myself writing back
variations of this paragraph:

I saw it too this morning on
Tyler's blog, and I wonder about it. That landscape is anything but
pristine; it has been a site for drilling for decades, it's not a new
thing, and Smithson chose to build Spiral Jetty right next to
the much larger, pre-existing, smelly and foul "oil jetty" for a
reason. One might say it fit well with his idea of entropy. The assertion that re-newed
attempts at drilling for oil in Great Salt Lake would upset the
"natural environment" may well be unfounded -- will it upset the jetty
structurally? Who knows. I think we need more information before we
jump on that bandwagon... Also, access to Spiral Jetty is through Golden Spike National Park, [the site of completion of the first transcontinental railroad... no oil company is going to be allowed to disrupt a National Park --read description of historical significance!] On another note, I think Smithson might
actually have loved the idea of more drilling, which goes back to the 1920s and is part of what defines the terrain. However, he would have been truly horrified by
the idea of turning the place into a museum-ified tourist trap, a
project Dia was batting around a while back... There must be more to
it than this; will see if more info turns up.

The "oil jetty" is mentioned in the directions to Spiral Jetty that are posted on Dia's website (see item 11 below). Note: back in 2002, upon our arrival at the oil jetty, Stefanie and I got out of our rental truck to stretch our legs and take a few pics -- oil jetty and environs is probably one of the most foul, stinking, detritus-strewn patches of post industrial wasteland I've ever had the pleasure to experience. There's no doubt that Smithson was into it, and that it was part of his decision to position the Jetty where he did:

11. At this gate, the Class D road designation ends and the quality of the road deteriorates markedly. If you choose to continue south for another 2.3 miles, and around the east side of Rozel Point, you will reach the Lake and see a jetty (not the Spiral Jetty), left by oil drilling exploration in the 1920s through the 1980s. As you approach the Lake, on your right you'll come across a concrete foundation remaining from a previously demolished structure.

From this location, the concrete foundation is the key to finding the road to the Spiral Jetty. After you drive slowly past the concrete foundation, take the fork in the road to the right up and onto a two-track trail that contours above the oil-exploration area. Only high clearance vehicles should advance beyond the concrete foundation.

I
remember from my visit to the Spiral Jetty years ago. An abandoned
mobile home--all shot up, an old half-buried pick up truck, and the
remnants of a wooden oil exploration jetty that dotted the landscape.
The rusted equipment brought to mind Smithson's Tour of the Monuments of Passaic and the pier Entropy and The New Monuments.
I'm sure Smithson viewed that same dilapidated jetty next to his that
was under construction. I expect thoughts of entropy danced through his
mind too. Thirty years later (after my visit) I've read that Dia has
removed the debris, too impatient for its eventual decay.

For
those who are opposed to all oil drilling on principle, that's another
story. Living among the oil rigs of Long Beach, I'm willing to accept
the anti-aesthetic, for the benefit of oil that hasn't been shipped
from the other side of the planet.

In theory, there's just one set of copyright rules and they apply to
everyone, from Sony Pictures to your neighbour's eight-year-old who
wants to photocopy his Spider-Man comics and sell them to the other
kids.

Regardless of who wants to make a new Spider-Man comic,
movie or other derivative work, that person has to hire a lawyer, have
that lawyer call up Marvel Comics, set up a call or a face-to-face,
negotiate a contract, sign it, pay a fee, and report on their ongoing
uses, opening their books for auditing and inspection.

Sony
Pictures can do this. It can send lawyers to Marvel and Marvel will
send its lawyers back to Sony. Everyone gets to sit at a long table and
hammer out the deal, then they issue a press release and go into
production.

But little Timmy can't do it. He never could. And yet
when you talk to comic book creators, they'll tell you that they got
started by drawing copies of other peoples' work.

Musicians
start by playing the music they love. Painters start by copying other
painters. Filmmakers try to recreate the effects and scenes they've
been inspired by in big-screen releases.

Aping each other

This
seems pretty basic: even primates watch each other and copy (or, if you
will, "ape") each other, so when one monkey figures out how to improve
a potato by dipping it in salt water, the whole gang follows suit.

We
copy each other to learn and to improve - it's one of the things that
makes us human, because we're a lot better at it than chimps.

It's
not just Timmy's Spider-Man comic. The babysitter brings over a bag of
DVDs to keep the kids quiet; you organise a singalong at the pub; you
make a mix tape as part of an awkward teenaged mating ritual: all these
uses fall on the wrong side of copyright law unless they are preceded
by a complex legal dance of the sort that mere mortals rarely even
glimpse, let alone partake of.

Through most of copyright's
history, we had two de facto systems: industrial regulation (governing
what big companies did with each others' stuff) and folk-copyright (the
rules of thumb that most of us understood to be true).

Spider-Man knock-off

This
meant that it was OK to photocopy a Dilbert toon for your cubicle wall,
make a copy of a record for your pal, or publish your own low-rent
Spider-Man knock-off in the school newspaper.

Folk-copyright
didn't have a lot of legal authority - it was completely backwards on
any number of subjects - but it worked. The likes of Time Warner, Sony,
Universal or EMI weren't going to bust you for what you got up to at
the OAPs' campfire singalong, and not just because they'd look foolish
for doing so.

It just wasn't cost-effective to hunt down all
the kids flogging fan-fiction Star Trek episodes in the dealer's rooms
of small regional science fiction conventions. Aside from the negative
PR, there was the sheer cost of wasting billable lawyer-hours on
something that couldn't possibly make you any money.

Then came
the internet, which introduced two critical changes: it made it easier
for folk-users of copyright to find each other and spread their
creations and copies farther than ever, and it made it easier for
enforcers to find them and threaten them, especially once tools like
the "notice and takedown" regime in the European Union Copyright
Directive and the US Digital Millennium Copyright Act came on the scene.

YouTube dance

Now
you have billionaire media empires behaving as though parents should
get a licence for a Prince song before they upload a YouTube video of
their adorable toddler dancing to it.

They are also acting as
though fan fiction writers should be applying for a licence too - along
with karaoke singers, would-be painters and, yes, the OAP picnickers
who've uploaded the shakycam video of last weekend's knees-up in the
church basement.

This is a genuinely radical idea: individuals
should hire lawyers to negotiate their personal use of cultural
material, or at least refrain from sharing their cultural activities
with others (except it's not's really culture if you're not sharing it,
is it?).

It's also a dumb idea. People aren't going to hire
lawyers to bless the singalong or Timmy's comic book. They're also not
going to stop doing culture.

New regime

We
need to stop shoe-horning cultural use into the little carve-outs in
copyright, such as fair dealing and fair use. Instead we need to
establish a new copyright regime that reflects the age-old normative
consensus about what's fair and what isn't at the small-scale,
hand-to-hand end of copying, display, performance and adaptation.

A
diverse and extremely sensible group of people are doing just this: the
Access to Knowledge (A2K) treaty is a proposal from the World
Intellectual Property Organization (WIPO) to set out the rights and
responsibilities of archivists, educators and people who provide access
to disabled users of information.

The drafting group - which is
open to the general public - includes representatives of creators'
groups (tellingly, no one from the corporations that buy creators'
works have taken part), disabled rights groups, technical standards
bodies, civil rights groups, even medical rights groups like Médecins
Sans Frontières.

A2K is at the top of the WIPO agenda. It's the first breath of sanity in the copyright debate. Let's hope it's not the last one.

I'm
accustomed to thinking of digital restrictions in the U.S. intellectual
property context. We’re told that DRM use restrictions are trade-offs
for getting material in digital form, but generally, the trade is a bad
one for the public.

As Kim described when I met her at a conference over the summer, the
Warumungu have a set of protocols around objects and representations of
people that restrict access to physical objects and photographs. Only
elders may see or authorize viewing of sacred objects; other objects
may be restricted by family or gender. Images of the deceased shouldn't
be viewed, and photographs are often physically effaced. When the
Warumungu archive objects or images, they want to implement the same
sort of restrictions.

They wanted an archive that was built around Warumungu
protocols for accessing and distributing materials (in many forms). One
of the first mandates was that everyone had to have a password so that
they could only see materials that they were meant to see based on
their family/country/community status.

Kim's response was to help construct a digital archive with access
controls — ACLs based not on copyright but on the various elements of a
person's community status. Your identity sets your view-port into the
archive; the computer will show only items you have permission to see.
The community can thus give objects context in the online archive
similar to that which situates them offline. As an object’s status
changes, the database can be updated to reflect new rights or
restrictions.

Yet the Mukurtu's form of "DRM" is fragile. Users are encouraged to print images or burn CDs, which have no controls built-in.

People can also print images or burn CDs and thus allow
the images to circulate more widely to others who live on outstations
or in other areas. In fact, one of the top priorities in Mukurtu's
development was that it needed to allow people to take things with
them, printing and burning were necessary to ensure circulation of the
materials.

Unlike copyright-DRM systems, which fall back to the most
restrictive state when exporting or communicating with "unsigned"
devices (such as blocking all copying and breaking or lowering playback resolution on high-definition monitors), this one defaults to granting access. It's up to the people using the system to determine how new and unknown situations should be handled.

Because the Murkurtu protocol-restrictions support community norms,
rather than oppose them, the system can trust its users to take objects
with them. If a member of the community chooses to show a picture to
someone the machine would not have, his or her interpretation prevails
— the machine doesn’t presume to capture or trump the nuance of the
social protocol. Social protocols can be reviewed or broken, and so the
human choice to comply gives them strength as community ties.

The Mukurtu Wumpurrarni-kari Archive has been developed by a community based in Australia's Northern Territory.

It asks every person who logs in for their name, age, sex and standing within their community.

This information then restricts what they can search for in the archive, offering a new take on DRM

Dr Kimberly Christian, who helped to develop the archive, told BBC World Service's Digital Planet programme that the need to create these profiles came from community traditions over what can and cannot be seen.

"It grew out of the Warumungu community people themselves, who were really interested in repatriating a lot of images and things that had been taken from the community," she said.

"You find this a lot in indigenous communities, not just in Australia but around the world... this really big push in these communities to get this information back and let people start looking at it and narrating it themselves." Where to look

Dr Christian, who is an assistant professor based at Washington State University, stumbled across the idea of the archive by chance after meeting a group of missionaries who had digitally archived photos of the Warumungu community since the 1930s.

After loading them onto her laptop, she took them back to Tennant Creek and set up a slideshow - where she noticed that people turned away when certain images came up on screen.

For example, men cannot view women's rituals, and people from one community cannot view material from another without first seeking permission. Meanwhile images of the deceased cannot be viewed by their families.

Offline website

"The way people were looking at the photos was embedded in the social system that already existed in the community," she said.

"People would come in and out of the area of the screen to look when they could look."

This threw up issues surrounding how the material could be archived, as it was not only about preserving the information into a database in a traditional sense, but also how people would access it depending on their gender, their relationship to other people and where they were situated.

Dr Christen and her team of software developers came up with what is described as "a website that's not online", containing photos, digital video clips, audio files, digital reproductions of cultural artefacts and documents.

The system has also been designed with a "two-click mantra" in mind, making the content easy to access for those with low computer literacy skills.

Images are arranged in their own categories, with content tagged with restrictions.

The project believes it has established a cultural solution as well as an opportunity for Aboriginals to collate much of what was once lost. The hope of the project's designers is that as culture and traditions change, history can be rewritten and changed by people themselves.

It's pure vapidness masquerading as a critique of the same. And I hate
it when one not-very-talented but high-profile artist does or makes
stupid things thereby justifying all the morleys in the world (as the comments here exhibit).

Read it and cringe:

Vanessa Beecroft in The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins.Courtesy of Pietra Brettkelly

Vanessa Beecroft had better prepare for some serious damage control,
since director Pietra Brettkelly's documentary on Beecroft, The Art Star and the Sudanese Twins,
opens at Sundance tonight. The doc cluster-bombs her faddish
fascination with Sudanese orphans and paints Beecroft as a
hypocritically self-aware, colossally colonial pomo narcissist. The
film is brutally effective because it lets Beecroft hang herself with
damaging quotes and appalling behavior.

The documentary explores Beecroft's experiment in Sudan, in which
she attempts to adopt two Sudanese orphans and use them as subjects in
her work. Wise to theory, Beecroft says her adoption will be "not just
fetishization of the blacks. It will be a beginning of a relationship
with that country." The film documents the significant gap between
Beecroft's theory and her actions.

Upon her arrival in the Sudan, Beecroft hurries to set up a photo
shoot, hiding the cameras from the orphanage's sisters, calling the
babies "these poor creatures." Which baby should she photograph? "Either one or the other," she says, "it doesn’t matter."

Repeatedly,
Beecroft claims that she "loves this culture" — but, in the film's most
disturbing scene, sisters from the orphanage try to stop her from
stripping the children nude inside their abbey for an elaborate photo
shoot. Beecroft refuses, complains, starts shooting again, and
eventually loses a physical confrontation with one of the sisters, who
takes the children away from her, furious that Beecroft is stripping
children naked inside a church. "Christ, these people," Beecroft moans,
as she barricades herself inside, pushing a pew up against the door to
keep the sisters out of their own abbey.

"My husband says, 'You are so superficial,'" Beecroft admits. But
Greg Durkin, a social anthropologist, says much worse in the film -- in
part because Beecroft spends months attempting to adopt these two
children without informing him. (When she finds that she needs to have
his approval, she considers a divorce.) He notes that Angelina Jolie's
and Madonna's adoptions rated them "a lot of press and publicity …
Vanessa's always been very receptive to that." Beecroft blithely
agrees, noting that she's always been obsessed with "the romance" of
celebrity magazines.

When Beecroft finally installs her final work, VB61: Still Death Darfur Still Deaf,
it's the standard Beecroft hokum: mostly-nude women in a public place,
only this time they're painted pitch black and covered with buckets of
fake blood (get it?). Intended to disturb, it mostly provokes giggles
from gawking tourists, but Brettkelly films the performance like
something in a David Fincher film. Beecroft stands over the bodies,
with red liquid dripping from her hands and splattered all over her
feet -- a murderer at the scene of a crime.

"Is it difficult to work with 30 black women?" a spectator asks. "Yes," Beecroft replies. "It is very stressful."